Now if only we could get a reasonable mITX NAS enclosure to put them in. IF you only need 1 or 2 drives there're plenty of enclosures just big enough to hold the mobo available; but if you want more drives than that you're stuck with something with enough internal volume to hold a tower style CPU cooler and full size GPU that's only marginally smaller than a compact mATX box.Reply

If you want a tiny box for the sole purpose of hosting a NAS, just buy an HP N40L or N54L and install FreeNAS.

No, you can't install your own CPU and motherboard, but this will actually save you money. The HP boxes are often discounted to the $200 range, they include CPU, ECC RAM, PSU and a boot drive. They're far better value for money than building from your own parts. They're more than fast enough to run FreeNAS and easily hold five, 3.5" drives, more in certain configurations.

With RAID Z2 using 4TB drives, these very tiny boxes can hold 12TB of usable storage. All while being far more reliable and recoverable than products like Synology or Drobo.Reply

It looks like both of those boxes support only four hard disks on top of their system drive, so a RAIDZ2 array is going to get you only 8TB of usable space. Besides that, you really shouldn't be running RAIDZ2 without at least six drives. (4+2).Reply

You can do 6x 2.5" drives in a 5.25" slot if you're willing to accept a 9.5mm height limit per drive, but my point was more that you really need a certain number of drives before raidz2 becomes practical, and that figure is 6ish. There's also the "before-redundancy drive count should be a power of two" thing, although I'm violating that rule myself without issue.

There would seem to be much better options for compact storage machines. The BitFenix Prodigy comes to mind. It can mount six 3.5" drives (including using the optical bay) and still has room for five 2.5" drives elsewhere in the case, which can be used for a mirrored boot plus SSDs for L2ARC/SLOG/etc acceleration. You'd likely need a SATA controller in the graphics slot, though, since few mITX boards would have the eleven SATA ports required to fully populate the thing.Reply

The HP is what I had in mind when I was talking about boxes way bigger than they need to be. It's 21x26x27cm = 14700cc. The chenbro case I used to build my nas is 31 x 20 x 27 = 16700 cc. For comparison, my old mediasmart server was 25 x 25 x14 = 8750 cc.

Other than the full size 5.25 bay, I'm not sure what the HP is doing to use all its space due to a lack of internal pictures; but between using an ATX PSU, having enough vertical room for a tower cooler and installing the drive bays with the long axis front to back and stopping short of the mobo, the case is about 30-40% open space and could be made a few inches smaller front to back and top to bottom. Side to side is constrained by the mobo size; but the other dimensions could have been cut significantly. I know mITX is too large to match my MediaSmart or any of the current generation of dedicated nas boxes; but it could be a lot closer.

The case I linked to is also hotswap; but barely takes any more room than the standard drive caddies. The only things that the HP appears to have that it doesn't are the 5.25" bay and support for a full height card instead of half and it has loads of room inside.

The NSC-400 mentioned by xkiller213 is a basic 4bay nas case that's only half the size of the HP. As long as you don't need a full size raid card it looks like it's able to do everything of the bigger cases; so there's definitely room to make them smaller. Adding support for a full size expansion card looks like it could be done just by making the case an inch taller so the card could fit in the space above the PSU.Reply

I managed to pick up a Chenbro ES34169 a while back for my NAS:http://www.chenbro.com/corporatesite/products_deta...Nice little case, with 4 hot-plug SATA bays on a backplane in pretty much the smallest possible space. Main issues are that it's a bit noisy unless you undervolt the fans, and the internal 120W PSU is custom, not a standard form factor.Unfortunately, it's gotten very hard to find now (I think it may have been discontinued?)Reply

Too little, too late. I waited for ages for these things to come out, to upgrade my file server. I eventually gave up, and grabbed seven 4TB Hitachi CoolSpin drives when they were on sale ofr $150. I'd rather have had the Red drives, but 4TB drives hit the market a full two years ago, in 2011. Two years late to market is just silly.Reply

While 4TB HDD is definitely good to have why dont these companies now directly come out with internal HDD with USB 3.0 or 3.1 ports? We really want to have such HDD in the market where we can have those cheap internal HDD and compatibility and portability of having one cable connection instead of 2 different ones. Really at-least one manufacturer should think on thisReply

um, yeah and on top of that most 2.5" wd external drives are just that. a drive with a usb plug instead of a sata + power one (probably there is a sata-usb chip directly on the drive, but that matters not.... the most annoying thing about this is that you can no longer repurpose external drives for internal use)Reply

By most you mean none? I'm glad noone actually makes a USB drive.... sometimes a drive in a USB enclosure is cheaper than the internal version, and the enclosure packaging holds up better to shipping then how some places ship OEM drives...Reply

Actually I just searched for this and you are right - the 2.5" passport line is including a SATA-USB conversion on the board, instead of a SATA connector. WOW, that sucks. Glad I never bought one of those.Reply